Eastern Union

“Mother,” the new movie by the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, which opens today and which Anthony Lane reviews in the magazine this week, leaves me both baffled and fascinated. On the one hand, the movie—in which an odd, rather feeble twenty-seven-year-old man is accused of murdering a young woman, and his absurdly overprotective mother undertakes a bold investigation to clear his name—has all the emotional depth and psychological insight of a marionette show. The intricate and twisty story flattens the characters, pulls the utterly typecast actors’ strings, and leaves them no margin for existence. But, on the other hand, the details that keep the story going convey a sense of the interesting things that Bong is getting at—such as the indifference of the police, the lack of a right to representation and the prohibitive cost of an attorney, the absence of due process and legal redress, and the unchecked violence and silenced memories of brutality that run like a silent current of agony beneath the placid formalities of Korean culture.

As such, “Mother” is two movies—one, a needlessly slow-paced, overly methodical, impersonal, even mechanical bore to sit through; and the other, a probing and angry vision of the society the director lives in. It’s a dichotomy that has become something of a commonplace in movies these days. “A Serious Man” and “Inglourious Basterds” both let ideas (in the Coen brothers’ case, deep and powerful ones) take over the filmmaking at the price of experience; “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” are message movies that stay on-message; Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” unspools in a straight line of historical determinism.

Direct address, op-ed style, is the off-screen vanishing point of much in the contemporary cinema. Some directors tend to rely on overt, unapologetic artifice to say what they have to say; others use techniques and tones of bland reporting to make their message pass almost unnoticed. (Bong, cleverly, does both.) But the dominant notion of directing these days is to have something to say.

Some filmmakers want to be serious men and women and avoid being perceived as mere entertainers. That’s an old story; message movies have always seemed of outsized critical significance. What has changed is the now commonplace recognition, imparted in media studies and even in high-school English classes, that there’s no such thing as neutral storytelling, and that every artistic composition, every visual representation, entails and embodies a wealth of ideological influences and prejudices—which makes filmmakers want to stake out their positions clearly. But the most worthwhile of recent movies reflect the tension of a rich range of ideologically ambiguous or indeterminate events—even when they’re movies of overt political commitment, the scripts don’t line things up too consistently, and the director’s eye shows more, and sees further, than what the director wants to say. Or else, raising the stakes of direct address, the filmmaker comes out from behind the curtain and adds him- or herself to the film, one way or another, as an artificer within the spectacle. In short, the notion of directing in the modern cinema has changed; the new freedoms of which directors partake are actually the old freedoms, reflected in the mirror of self-consciousness and exhibited in a self-aware display of style.

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